The Pirate Bay Takes on YouTube with The Video Bay

The Pirate Bay, the infamous Scandinavian Web site whose founders were found guilty of contributing to copyright infringement earlier this year, have expanded their horizons.The Pirate Bay hosts trackers, which index the various pieces of a particular video, audio, or...

The Pirate Bay hosts trackers, which index the various pieces of a particular video, audio, or software fle hosted by users around the Web. The BitTorrent software that the Pirate Bay uses as its distribution mechanism allows users to download those files, and own them.

In some cases, apparently, even pirates don't want to clog their hard drives. Enter The Video Bay, a Flash-based clone of YouTube, where users can upload and watch files to their heart's content. The key, of course, is that those files can apparently be just about anything: copyrighted content included, of course.

Currently, the site is rather devoid of content, with just a few videos
(most of them music videos, for whatever reason) uploaded to the site.
To join, users will need to contribute a username and password,
complete with Internet address, which may be a bit of a deterrent to
privacy-seeking pirates.

And there's one more key requirement: the site uses the "video" and "audio" tags found in HTML 5.0,
which simplify the encoding of video down to just an HTML tag. That
means you'll need either Firefox 3.5 beta 4, the Opera 9.52 preview,
Google Chrome 3, or Safari 3.4 or Safari 4 to enable the video features.

However, my guess is that people will flock to the site because, ironically, The Pirate Bay is a respected brand, one where people can generally expect to find pirated goods and not malware.

From a legal standpoint, of course, The Video Bay will undoubtedly attract the attentions of the MPAA and other rightsholders worldwide. But The Pirate Bay founders have been taken a defiant stance on their actions, and it's likely they'll take the same attitude here.